This Winter Carnival promises to be yet another time when sacred Dartmouth traditions are upheld. The Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, a staple of the weekend since 1978, will be no exception.
Joined by special guests Peter Apfelbaum (tenor saxophone), Bob Gulloti (drums), and Michael Ray (trumpet) and the Cosmic Krewe, the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble will pay homage to jazz greats Don Cherry and John Gilmore in Saturday's Winter Carnival concert.
Originally named after a red-light district in San Francisco, the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble lives up to its reputation delivering a melange of music by Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Peter Apfelbaum, Duke Ellington, Michael Ray and Don Glasgo.
Coast students Kazu Munakata '96 (trumpet), Taurey Butler '96 (piano), and Tanielle McBain '96 (vocals) show off their talent as well.
The second half of Barbary's tribute consists of what Peter Waltrous of The New York Times called music caught between "James Brown, Sun-Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic."
Michael Ray and the Cosmic Krewe, with special guest Peter Apfelbaum, will play their "jazz/funk of the future," and the audience should anxiously expect the unexpected from these spontaneous masters of improvisation.
Both Ray and Apfelbaum have a history of bringing the cutting edge of jazz to Dartmouth. Ray has previously appeared four times with the Barbary coast: with Sun Ra in 1990 in the "Trumpet Summit: A Tribute to Miles Davis" 1991, "Tribute to Sun-Ra" in 1993, and an all-star presentation of "James Harvey and the H-Mob" in 1994.
A child prodigy, Apfelbaum recorded his first album with the Hieroglyphics Ensemble at age 18. As a composer, he spent time at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock exploring new jazz.
He came to Dartmouth with Cherry in 1991 and with Karl Berger in 1992. Apfelbaum played tenor saxophone and piano in Cherry's MultiKulti Quartet, as well as performing with Cherry internationally at many festivals including the Discover Jazz Festival in Burlington (1993).
Drummer Gulloti and Ray's Cosmic Krewe mark their first performance at Dartmouth this weekend. Hailing from Boston, Gulloti can only add to this extraordinary talent pool.
He is "the driving force behind one of the best 'free jazz' trios" around today, according toThe Fringe. While Ray has appeared in Spaulding Auditorium before, Saturday night will be a first appearance for the Cosmic Krewe.
Representative of their New Orleans ties, "krewe" refers to the floats of a Mardi Gras parade.
After all, Cherry and Gilmore weren't just musicians -- they were "architects of sound." As a visiting professor in 1970, Cherry taught his radical "spontaneous conducting" to a packed Dartmouth class.
In an interview with Keith Knox, Cherry explained that spontaneous conducting "leaves the freedom for the musicians to use their own individual self-expression collectively. And it still creates a completeness in form."
Worldly and politically active, Cherry brought multi-culturalism and world-fusion music into the classroom to teach the true meaning of being a musician. He explained in the interview that "reading music is one thing, making music is another."
"... in the west, everyone has an instrument and then they learn notes and they feel their notes are music. But there's the other concept in the east or in Africa, people make their own instruments and then from it being that much a part of them, and then automatically trying to make music ... [L]ater on, they learn about notes, you know, if they cared to or not.
As a "pocket trumpet" aficionado, Cherry made music that was "loose and greasy, devoid of academic pretension and soaked in a liberated feeling for the blues, [it] could be heard lacing the air with innovative fire and the anxious sting of modern American life."
He also played all kinds of instruments like the doussn'gouni from Mali, keyboards, wooden flutes, and percussion.
Equally impressive, Gilmore spent forty years playing with Sun Ra because he liked the challenge of hard music. To Gilmore, being with Sun-Ra was like being with "tomorrow's newspaper headlines. Because he knows what's gonna happen before it happens ... There's never a dull moment."
Though content to sit in the shadows of Sun Ra's limelight, Gilmore's hard work paid off. Ray commented that Gilmore would "play for four hours -- long tones -- without even putting the mouthpiece on the horn!"
Because of his obsessive practicing and innate talent, Gilmore could belt out solos, one after the other, in any style. He helped revolutionize jazz by inspiring Coltrane's "Chasin' the Trane" and "exemplified the maintenance of tradition at the core of innovation."
The loss of Cherry and Gilmore compels jazz lovers to remember these two special artists. Cherry's sudden death of hepatitis and liver disease took the world by surprise. Gilmore died of complications from emphysema.
Apfelbaum remembered, "He was a different kind of person, incredibly compassionate, and the kind of person you really miss." Don Glasgo surmised that after the death of Sun Ra, "Gilmore's spirit simply gave up."
